Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T03:07:56.936Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Modality, Mechanism and Translational Indeterminacy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Duncan MacIntosh
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University

Extract

How does Quine argue to the indeterminacy of translation? It has always been hard to tell, but one construction goes like this: A fact is determinate only if it is empirically determinable, for empirical evidence under-determines truth about the trans-empirical; theory is underdetermined by data. Therefore, facts about the unobservable, facts of theory, are indeterminate. A fact about the meaning of a person's sentence is only determinate if it is empirically determinable. The meaning of a person's sentence is empirically determinable only if it is empirically determinable under what conditions he assents to it. The meaning of a person's sentence about something unobservable is determinable only if it is determinable what unobservable events are occurring whenever he assents to a sentence supposedly about the unobservable. It is not empirically determinable what is going on in the unobservable realm whenever someone assents to a sentence supposedly about the unobservable. Therefore it is undeterminable what a person's theory sentence means. Therefore what it means is indeterminate.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Quine, W. V., 1960 Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V., 1969 Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Warmbōd, Ken, 1988 “Behaviourism, Neuroscience and Translational Indeterminacy”, paper presented at the 1988 meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Windsor, Ontario, Canada; revised version forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (March 1991).Google Scholar